Intel: The Biggest Software Company You've Never Heard Of

It can be tough being a 12-year-old boy. It’s even tougher if your mom is Renée James.

When James’ 12-year-old son asked if he could buy a particularly violent video game, his mom -- who runs Intel’s software and services business -- had a ridiculously well-informed opinion.

James sells the physics software used to model the game’s over-the-top mayhem. Her answer: you’re not old enough.

Call Intel the Palmolive of the software business: the biggest software company you’ve never heard of could be the semiconductor company everyone has. If you’re wondering what Intel makes, the answer is that you’re already soaking in it.

For years, Intel’s software developers -- who build everything from nutsy-boltsy stuff like compilers and debuggers to exotic parallel programming tools -- have been one of the company’s secret weapons. Intel turbo-charges the Linux community by putting hundreds of full-time engineers to work on the free operating system. Intel’s tools helped Apple’s engineers move its Macintosh computers to Intel processors. A few years later, Intel helped Google move into the smartphone business.

Maybe the company’s biggest software triumph has been its push into high-performance computing. Five of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world now run Intel’s chips. Part of the credit goes to Intel’s years-long push to build software that make its chips useful for serious scientific work. “We go to work on the hard problems, the really hard problems,” James says.

Using software to help sell silicon is a strategy James has pursued for nearly a decade. James, who was promoted to senior vice president at Intel in 2010, has led Intel’s software and services group since 2005. Prior to that, the 25-year Intel veteran led a team that managed Intel’s relationship with Microsoft.

Intel’s engineers build tools and software, spin up developer programs that provide customers with help, and seed nearly 2,900 educational institutions with tools, training and other resources. The company has one of the industry’s largest developer programs, working more than 20,000 independent software vendors. “We’ve been very quiet for a long time, because we didn’t want to flaunt it,” James says.

Intel’s acquisitions, however, have raised the company’s software profile. Over the past decade, Intel has been steadily snapping up software companies (see below). With the acquisition of security software vendor McAfee last year, Intel became one of the world’s 10 largest software companies.

While Intel isn’t in the same league as Oracle, VMWare (where James is a board member), Intuit, or Symantec; it’s now comparable in size to some pretty serious software companies, including BMC Software and Red Hat. The McAfee deal -- which closed in February 2011 -- caused Intel’s software sales to balloon to $1.8 billion last year from $264 million in 2010.

Intel’s plan is to tune McAfee’s software and Intel’s processors to work more closely together, cracking the security problems that have plagued consumers the same way it attacked high-end supercomputing problems.

It’s the sort of approach that’s been used to help build super-secure products in high-end niches, but never been tried in products used by hundreds of millions of people. With more personal financial information going online, however, consumers are going to want machines that can offer more sophisticated security. “I feel like I’m the snow plow,” James says. “Our strategy is 100% about creating opportunities for Intel’s silicon.”